Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

My father liked to record in the books he bought the date of purchase.
Each book became a marker in the unfolding of his life. Though long
gone, my father and I meet often on the pages of the many books from his
library that are interspersed in mine. Every year at this time, I take
off the shelf his slender Hebrew edition of the Order of Lamentations
for Tisha b'Av to ready myself for the fast day. I never fail to be
arrested by the date stamped on its first page beneath my father's name:
January 12, 1933. Hitler came to power as Germany's Chancellor exactly
18 days later on January 30. The pall of Tisha b'Av descended in
mid–winter that year and would not lift till the spring of 1945.

Yom Kippur and the Ninth of Av are the only 24–hour fasts in the Jewish
calendar. On both we deny ourselves from sunset to sunset all food and
drink, bathing and cosmetics, the wearing of leather shoes and sexual
relations. Moreover, the two fast days complement each other elegantly
and profoundly. While Yom Kippur highlights the supremacy of the
individual by investing our personal lives with ultimate meaning, Tisha
b'Av reminds us of our inextricable membership in the Jewish people as
we ponder the recurring tragedies of Jewish history. A fully satisfying
religious life requires not only nearness to God, but ties to a faith
community.

If Tisha b'Av commemorated only the destruction of the two Temples in
586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E., its capacity to appeal to the modern Jew would
have vanished. Though it is true that both calamities threatened the
very survival of the Jewish people, Conservative Jews no longer pray for
the restoration of the sacrificial cult in Jerusalem. The verbal and
musical worship of the synagogue surely represents a more edifying,
humane and universal form of prayer. But early on, Tisha b'Av began to
absorb the memory of other national disasters. Thus the Mishna
stipulates already around the year 200 C.E. that the Ninth of Av brings
to mind not only the end of the Temples of Solomon and Herod, but also
the divine decree to condemn the Israelites redeemed from Egypt to die
in the wilderness and the final crushing of the Bar Kokhba rebellion at
Betar.

Similarly, Rabbi Isaac Abravanel was to write after the expulsion of
Spanish Jewry in 1492 that the last Jew left Spain on Tisha b'Av. In
point of fact, all Jews who had not converted were to be out of the
country by July 31, which coincided with the 7th of Av. But the
coincidence was remarkable enough to allow Abravanel to find a measure
of consolation. Order is a key to meaning: There could be nothing
accidental that "the expulsion of Jerusalem which resided in Spain" (his
phrase, lifted from Obadiah 1:20) was fated to take place on a day set
aside by God long before to mete out punishment to Israel.

And perhaps even to the world. World War I – which would decimate a
generation of young men, change the face of Europe and set in motion a
chain reaction of conflagrations that would not end for 75 years –
erupted on August 1, 1914, which that year ominously fell on the Ninth
of Av. The carnage would sadly confirm the ancient wisdom of the
Rabbis: once the forces of destruction are unleashed, the righteous and
wicked perish indiscriminately. The Order of Lamentations for Tisha b'Av
is indeed a liturgical anthology of Jewish suffering through the ages,
specific and generic, a prism refracting the vulnerability of a homeless
people doggedly adhering to its own faith. For example, it includes the
grief–stricken dirge by Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, the leader of German
Jewry in the second half of the 13th century at the massive burning of
the Talmud (the first ever) by the Church in Paris in 1242. His anguish
and theology permit him to remonstrate with God. "How could that given
in divine fire (at Sinai) be consumed by human fire without any of the
perpetrators being burned?... Is there perhaps a new revelation? Is
that why Your scrolls were burned?... I am distraught! How could food
ever sweeten my palate again after I saw how they gather up Your
spoils?" (my translation)

It is precisely that expansive and inclusive quality of Tisha b'Av that
makes the day for me a vehicle to mourn the Six Million. The nature of
Jewish history keeps the Order of Lamentations from ever being
finished. How incredibly shortsighted of us, if understandable, not to
have incorporated the commemoration of the Holocaust into that cathartic
ritual. In consequence, we are now saddled with two distinct days of
remembrance (Kristallnacht on the 9th of November and Yom ha–Shoah on
the 27th of Nisan) that are ritually and spiritually impoverished.

And yet we are not without liturgical resources to reinvigorate our
observance of Tisha b'Av. Nearly 20 years ago, Abba Kovner, the founder
of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, composed a contemporary martyrology
that vibrates with artistic and spiritual intensity. Inspired by the
paradox of the Hasidic master Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotsk that, "There
is nothing more whole than a broken Jewish heart," Scrolls of Fire
consists of 52 episodes of violence drawn from the sweep of Jewish
history. Each is recounted briefly in exalted prose and adorned with an
evocative piece of abstract art by Dan Reisinger. The mood is elegiac
rather than angry. Kovner never confronts God directly like a
traditional pietist, though the layout of the book impresses me as an
implicit rebuke: a parasha for each weekly portion of the Torah, the
grim commentary of history on the word of God, a kind of
counter–revelation on the fate of being chosen. Whatever Kovner's
intent, he has crafted an Order of Lamentations for our time, an era
saturated with knowledge of the past and drenched in blood.

But one day of remembrance, enacted wholeheartedly is sufficient. Three
weeks of escalating mournfulness, beginning with the fast day on the
17th of Tammuz, threatens to turn martyrology and victimhood into a
world view. The creation of Israel has endowed the Jewish people with
an unprecedented degree of power that is ill–served by a festering sense
of resentment, an abiding angst over insecurity and a messianic zeal to
right past wrongs. To brood on our long history of impotence can only
blunt our political judgment in an age when so much has changed and
obscure the ideals of justice and righteousness that were to mark the
descendants of Abraham and cast a beacon for the world.